James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books, including his most recent work Watermelons: How the Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future, also available in the US, and in Australia as Killing the Earth to Save It. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com.
Global Weirding: the new Big Lie
By James Delingpole Last updated: March 31st, 2012
They're calling it Global Weirding now, as I suppose, inevitably they were bound to do in the end. Well "global warming" stopped working in 1989 when the globe stopped warming. Climate change was always a bit of a non-starter because climate does change regardless of whether or not we all drive 4 x 4s, or buy carbon offsets or listen to Stephen Fry and Ron Weasley's injunction to take our holidays in England this year. And Global Climate Disruption, as some pillock tried to christen it, was never going to catch on because, well, it's just too blatantly contrived and desperate isn't it?
So Global Weirding it is. The concept was popularised last week in acharacteristically dire and parti pris BBC Horizon documentary which purported to have lots of new evidence (or 'hearsay' as it would more likely have been termed in a court of law) showing that our weather is getting more extreme – weirder. It seems to have been broadcast to coincide with a new IPCC report which has been excitedly written up in newspapers like the Guardian and the Detroit Free Press as evidence that we are heading towards climate disaster.
Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heatwaves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of scientists has said.The greatest danger is in highly populated, poorer regions, but no corner of the globe is immune. The document, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heatwaves, deluges and droughts, and blames man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.
But this is pretty much the exact opposite of what the IPCC report actually says. As Roger Pielke Jr has noted, the report is a far cry from the IPCC's usual slipshod, scaremongering standards:
Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where "right" means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):
- "There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change"
- "The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados"
- "The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses"
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:"Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research."
So what this IPCC report is saying is that WE DO NOT KNOW if there's an anthropogenic signal in extreme weather patterns, and that there does not seem to be a trend towards increased extreme weather events such as tornados and tropical storms. Yet the liberal MSM is reporting the opposite. How come?
Well here's the weird part. The misinformation comes from the IPCC's summary of its own report (available here) which has been regurgitated, in classic churnalism style, by all the usual lazy MSM suspects. (H/TKatabasis)
It begins:
"Evidence suggests that climate change has led to changes in climate extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in the past half century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said today."
The IPCC, of course, has form in this regard. With its four Assessment Reports, its Summaries for Policymakers have been notably more extreme and confident in CAGW than the reports themselves warrant. So yet again what we have here is the work of serious-minded, neutral scientists (yes, they do still exist) being twisted for political purposes by activists.
As we know, the great global warming alarmism Ponzi scheme is looking extremely vulnerable at the moment. Global warming has stopped. There's a growing public backlash against eco-taxes, ugly flickery lightbulbs, higher energy bills, bat chomping eco-crucifixes and all the other paraphernalia of the environmental religion. And unfortunately, as we saw in '44 and '45, what these kind of people do when they get backed into a corner is not surrender but get nastier and more devious.
We've seen this recently in the Fakegate affair. And in Leo Hickman of the Guardian's contemptible "expose" of one of the hitherto anonymous donors of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. And in the Planet Under Pressure comedy conference staged last week by comedy organisations including the Royal Society, mainly in order to try to breathe new life into the stagnant, green-tinged corpse of climate alarmism.
One of the speakers at Planet Under Pressure claimed – in apparent seriousness – that climate scepticism was an illness that needed to be treated.
Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be "treated", according to an Oregon-based professor of "sociology and environmental studies". Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South.Prof Norgaard holds a B.S. in biology and a master's and PhD in sociology.
"Over the past ten years I have published and taught in the areas of environmental sociology, gender and environment, race and environment, climate change, sociology of culture, social movements and sociology of emotions," she says.
The effort to re-brand legitimate scientific dissent as a mental disorder that requires pharmacological or psychological treatment is a frightening glimpse into the Brave New World society climate change alarmists see themselves as ruling over.Due to the fact that skepticism towards man-made global warming is running at an all time high, and with good reason, rather than admit they have lost the debate, climate change alarmists are instead advocating that their ideological opponents simply be drugged or brainwashed into compliance.
Lysenko, anyone?
The atmosphere has changed – figuratively, I mean. The notion that the world should be administered by some sort of UN Environmental Tribunal enforcing carbon quotas on industrialised nations – a prospect which seemed likely three years ago – suddenly looks risible.
What happened? Each side has its theory. According to the greenies, selfish Westerners are to blame. The 2009 Copenhagen summit was their last chance to save the planet, but they were too downright greedy. Delegates from low-lying countries – 'quiet, sombre people with sad eyes' Johann Hari called them (so it must be true) – were betrayed, their homes condemned to the fate of Atlantis.
Sceptics point instead to the leak, also in 2009, of emails from some of the sacerdotal guardians of the AGW flame: the famous 'hide the decline' messages. Once the public saw climate scientists behaving so tendentiously, they withdrew their deference. In the aftermath of the Climategate revelations, further exposés happened on an almost weekly basis: the Himalayan glaciers were not scheduled to disappear by 2035, climate change was not threatening 40 per cent of the Amazonian rainforest and so on. The old incantations had lost their magic.
Me, I think there is a far more obvious explanation. Since 1998, the world has stopped getting warmer. There are, of course, different ways to measure temperature, and both sides are able to find statistics that support their respective outlooks. What is incontestable, though, is that the planet has not heated in anything like the way that proponents of AGW told us it would. Insofar as a hypothesis can ever be definitively falsified by events, this one has been falsified.
Do the data mean that the upward trend in temperature has ceased? No, it could start again tomorrow (that's the thing about weather – it's hard to predict). Do they mean that there is no connection between CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect? Again, no. Do they mean that human activity has no impact on climate? Nope.
What they do suggest, though, is that the Biblical warnings routinely being issued in the 1990s were false. The world may be warming, and that warming may have an anthropogenic component, but the change is nothing like as cataclysmic as claimed. To decarbonise the global economy is now seen, by most governments, as a misallocation of resources.
Some commentators complain that 'populism' has trumped 'science', but it would be negligent for elected governments not to take such decisions. Politicians, unless they happen to be trained oceanographers or meteorologists or whatever, are not the best people to interpret scientific research; but they are the best people to decide what constitutes a proportionate governmental response. If we disagree with their judgment, we can replace them. That's how the system is supposed to work.
These thoughts are prompted by the book I read over Easter:Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing your Children's Future by James Delingpole. James was the man who, right here on Telegraph Blogs, broke the story of the leaked emails – an achievement which, characteristically, he rates as being up there with the discovery of penicillin and the defeat of Hitler.
Not that I blame James for dwelling on his victory. It was a tremendous moment. And it's useful to have those emails explained and contextualised. At the time, the sheer mass of detail was too much for me, as I suspect it was for most people.
The thing that really interests Delingpole, though, is what motivates the greenies. Why has the recent decline in temperatures had no impact on their Weltanschauung? Why is there such a gulf between the raw evidence and the interpretation they put on it? Because, he avers, AGW was never really about the science. The science – or one version of the science – was simply one more way to advance a series of political objectives: supranationalism, redistribution of resources, a bigger role for the state and so on.
While some eco-campaigners are motivated by a more or less uncomplicated desire to preserve the natural environment, those setting the agenda have an altogether more ambitious end. They see the underlying problem as one of overpopulation. Man is, as the first issue ofThe Ecologist put it, 'a parasite', a 'disease which is still spreading exponentially'. Their long term goal is deindustrialisation and depopulation.
When put like that it sounds extreme, and Delingpole is acutely aware of the danger that he will come across as a conspiracy theorist. So he does his best to let the greenies speak for themselves. He quotes book after book, paper after paper, in which the goal of a smaller and poorer human population is openly advocated. If this is a conspiracy, it is perhaps what H G Wells called an 'open conspiracy'.
Is Delingpole right? Up to a point. There is a line in an old hymn: 'Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile'. Quite a few ecologists, I suspect, feel the force of that line without being in the least bit misanthropic. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Greens, and count a couple of their leaders among my friends. They are the least sinister people you could meet: generous, honest and amiable. They make no attempt to hide their opinion that things have been going downhill since our Neolithic ancestors abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I remember an argument with one of them over a couple of bottles of wine in which she cited masses of archaeological evidence in support of her claim that technological progress had been deleterious to our quality of life ever since the agrarian revolution 10,000 years ago. Farming allowed our numbers to teem, but also brought previously unknown afflictions: twisted bones caused by the unnatural posture required to grind flour; broken teeth caused by eating rough bread; slavery. It's hardly her fault that the BBC doesn't dwell on this aspect of her thinking.
Delingpole is a brilliantly funny and entertaining writer. You'll zoom through his book in a day and, at the end, you'll be able to win almost any argument about climate change. Not that such arguments will be around for much longer, at least not in their present form. The rows over windfarms and emissions trading are being overtaken by events. The war between freedom and control, though, is endless, elemental, Manichaean.
No comments:
Post a Comment